Posts Tagged ‘children’
Monday, September 28th, 2009
I’m six. I am sitting in the dentist’s chair and I am that child again who hid in the waiting room, jaws firmly clenching shut, face numb. The dentist has already given me five injections and has only one left to administer before he can extract the tooth … but nothing was getting me back into that chair. My mother called in friends of mine, friends of my older siblings, adults, and even bribed with all my favourite sweets and desserts. But she eventually sighed deeply and dragged me home. That was the beginning of my bad encounters with dentists and I still have a phobia.
… or maybe I am just stubborn. I look at my child and shudder at the thought that he might turn out like me and put me through this kind of hell. And then I realise that perhaps he already is. Could I have made him like that in the short time I have had with him, or is it feasible that I had nothing to do with it apart from the genetic perspective?
Most relevant right now, it seems, is the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I have had it since I can remember. I never knew what it was but I remember seeing it come up in all my aptitude tests and I trusted my parents to discuss with me anything that I might need more information on so as to better manage who I am. They never did. I see the same characteristics so clearly in my son and I blame myself for his being like that anyway because, whether it was nature or nurture, he is like that because of me.
One can never tell what really is nature or nurture because you can’t experiment with both simultaneously.
Tags: children, parenting
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Monday, September 7th, 2009
A new friend is a friend out of our connection over the lack of any real need to have children. I am known to her boyfriend as the evil one as he is determined to have kids (to the point of dumping her if it doesn’t happen). I suppose it is unfair of me to try and dissuade her as there are things that can be done to pre-empt any of the crap that enters your relationship when having a baby. There are practical tricks and tactics that can be deployed.
For example:
discussing expectations of parenthood;
defining a budget for things such as a night nurse;
planning logistics around routine and responsibilities;
looking at the potential need to move in order to accommodate a child;
balancing work and social commitments and sacrifices;
counselling sessions before even trying to fall pregnant.
You can’t have it all. We want it all – I suppose that is normal … what makes us human. But having something always comes at the cost of giving up something else. And perhaps that should be fine. Having a baby costs. We can’t expect to keep everything of what we were before having a baby … and have the baby too.
Tags: babies, children, choice, marriage, relationships
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
I know now why all those ex friends and acquaintances kept encouraging me to do the child thing … they just wanted to be able to be my friend again. I used to find it shallow that they couldn’t be friends because I hadn’t given birth … like they were part of some secret club and I didn’t know the password. But I have found myself guilty of a similar thing lately – I have been befriending people I haven’t seen in years because they have since had a child. Once you have had the identity crisis that having a baby brings, it is just so much less intimidating being around people who just may be on the same wavelength as you are.
I find myself trying to play it safe, play down the parent thing, when out with childless couples. I feel boring talking about my child and wonder why it is any less boring than a friend talking about their job … but that’s how it is; it’s my new reality.
The biggest problem … and this is quite huge … is when you don’t like your friends’ children or your friends don’t like yours! There’s also that thing when people become their children. I’m guilty of it … as is every parent I know … you have to get through the invisible shield that holds all the child-related angst and bullterrier-like protectiveness before you can get to and engage with the real me.
Tags: babies, children, friends, parenting
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
This post started out with the intention to be about the MTN Science Centre – it’s chaos, things are broken a lot of the time … and it involves going to a mall! But it’s fantabulous fun for an incredibly active child.
It could even be about sending my child to a friend and each time having to retrain him back to normality on his return due to his exposure to extraordinary behavioural quirks.
But it’s about something far more pertinent to me right now.
A friend of mine more than implied that I pander to my child. I don’t take criticism (constructive or otherwise) at all lightly as I tend to analyse everything that is said. I was firstly shocked that she said it at all and then I was shocked that I of all people actually pander to my child. The horror of it! I started feeling like a total fraud.
I took it away and thought about it … a lot! And what I came out with is that I don’t pander to him at all. In fact, it’s shocking how little I let him get away with and how he has actually been on the verge of rebelling … at the tender age of 10 years pre-teen. ‘Defiant’, is what his teacher calls it.
I should have known better, having studied developmental psychology … and using it more on my dog than on my child. When someone is constantly abused by someone else, they will eventually reach a point when they have to let some of it go … and it invariably ends up being dumped onto the people they care about most. Something like kicking Pavlov’s dog. It’s sometimes hurtful, it can often be shrugged off … but then there are those rare occurrences when you can use someone else’s rubbish to clean up your own home.
Two days of a little more pandering and his defiance is already on the wane. We’re all dysfunctional; we just have to learn to share it around a little.
Tags: children, conditioning, critism, defiant, dysfuntional, friends, fun
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
I have two children … one is a cuddly 3-year-old boy and the other is a 50kg Ridgeback. I feel like a teenager when I want a bit of privacy with my husband because we have to sneak around if we want so much as a private hug. If Nic sees us, he reaches up and demands a group hug and if Jama, sees us he just pushes between our legs and stands there wagging his tail.
A friend of mine asked my advice about training a new puppy and I told her to use her skills she has learned being a mother. I take that back as I obviously did something seriously wrong at puppy school.
Tags: children, husband, privacy, Ridgeback
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Monday, May 18th, 2009
You have got to be kidding! It’s Monday … that in itself is reason enough to be moody … and my limits have been tested already … and it’s not only 9 a.m. Just when I though I was over the morning’s hurdles, I arrived at my child’s school to find a party invitation to a Boot Camp. I have spent the better part of three years ensuring that my child does not fall into any stereotyping traps and … so far so good. And now this. You can’t be serious! In normal circumstances I would just turf the invite and he would have been none the wiser, but this is his favourite school friend and we’d have a real war on our hands if he couldn’t go.
I believe in the nature argument, I really do, but surely parents can see that they are sticking their children in boxes. Girls ARE good at sports. Boys DO cry. In this metrosexual age, what are we doing to ensure our children grow up to be well balanced? Children are not shut down to anything – they are capable of everything. I just wish we could get past gender.
Tags: Bootcamp, children, gender issues, metrosexual, stereotyping, traps
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
I didn’t think it was for real … kids say some odd stuff but they don’t really say this kind of thing. Or do they?
We took our child to play with the son of my husband’s old school friend (someone he played with from around this age), and their lunchtime conversation was entirely about who’s dad was not only bigger … but cooler! It seems the competition had to do with who had the best tools … something I think the mums might have been more qualified to argue. :D
Tags: children, comparison, dad
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Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
I have a friend who believes in this concept – amazingly, just the one. There are those who get really uptight if you so much as reprimand their kids for such indiscretions as smacking, kicking or even biting your own precious offspring. And then there are those who believe that bringing up baby all on your own is a lark and if not for the input from all around, your child would not be quite as balanced as one would wish. Perhaps all the breeding for more and more kids has a lot to do with parents trying to create their own mini-village … who knows. I certainly don’t have a clue what it’s all about and I could spend this lifetime and the next trying to figure it out.
Like any crisis that happens en mass, people tend not to individualise in order to better contain it. This seems to be what happens with parenthood – it happens to everyone who has a child so parents are grouped together into one collective and a rule of generalisation is applied to everyone in the collective. But, behind the scenes, there are people screaming in pain at the stress of it. Broken marriages, non-existent sex lives, grey hair and emotionally screwed up children.
It is not easier being part of the collective … ‘the collective’ is not the same as ‘the village’.
Tags: children, collective, family, friends, new parent, parenting, village life
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Sunday, April 26th, 2009
I had a dream last night. It involved India … which a lot of my dreams do at the moment. To put this in context, I have always lived in tiny homes and, although content, I would have recurring dreams about discovering one day that there was a secret basement or attic or just a whole lot of extra room. Now that I have a bigger home, I no longer have this dream. Now that I have a child and a dog, I have the freedom dreams – the ones that involve international travel to exotic destinations … the ones I wouldn’t know how to travel in with a child in tow because I only really know backpacker travel to these destinations and doubt I would even enjoy it any other way.
Anyway, about the dream. I was in India (obviously) and there was a cricket game due to start on the weekend after me and husband (note, no child) were due to leave. I was talking to my husband about the possibility of staying on and couldn’t he negotiate it with his boss (I had grown up in this dream and there was employment involved). He sat there looking at me but every time he tried to speak, all he could do was snore. Of course, I woke up moments later to a loudly snoring husband, a child who had climbed into our bed and a dog crying to be let out for the fourth time because he had eaten something dodgy out of the compost heap again.
Freedom? What’s that?
Tags: children, contentment, dreams, freedom, husband, india, small spaces, snoring, travel
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Possibly the two most important things I have taught my son: the one is that he has every right to stand up to me when I am angry with him and he feels he is being judged unfairly and the other is that no matter how angry I get with him that I still think he is the most awesome human being and I love him more than anything.
He gives me a hug and a kiss and asks me if I am happy. This is after telling me not to shout and reassuring me that he knows that I love him even though I am cross.
Tags: balance, children, love, parenting, respect
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Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Luck is like God. It isn’t real but we believe in it anyway. We pray to the god of chance. Waiting for things to happen albeit pure accident. Was he an accident or a stroke of luck? Do I write by chance? Am I lucky to have a craft? Give me Morgan Stanley’s share option rules to decipher. Hand me that clipboard. Prove there is a God. Show me probabilities and percentages. Accidental drifting across the sea. Across thresholds. Chance encounters. Destiny. Decided. There would be no love without luck, chance or accident. The need to believe is all-consuming … unless it is belief in oneself. Take God out of the equation: I have a better chance of believing in myself without her. Are there any accidents in life or do we make them in order to go forward? He pushed me out of my inertia. He is my luck. My little god. My noo-noo. My boy. My child.
Tags: chance, children, destiny, God, Karma, luck, Religion, work
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